Tag Archives: PRWeek

Women in Leadership
It’s a great time to be in the PR industry – shaping public perception of key issues, political figures, and new products coming to market. Specifically, 2013 is a great year to be a woman in PR with plenty of room to push forward with networking playing a key role in making the move.

The formidable industry outlet PRWEEK offers two strong barometers in their ranking lists of professionals. The growth of powerful woman within their awards speaks volumes – this year almost half of PRWEEK’s 50 Power List were women and more than half of their recent 40 under 40 honorees were women. Continue reading →

For the most part, I find the PR industry’s trade publications — PRWeek, PRNewser, PRNews, etc. — to be good standard-bearers for effectively covering the ins-and-outs of this diverse and growing industry. Sure, they tend to focus too much on AOR announcements — the old-time stock ticker-tape reports of PR — but they do the job.

So I try to do my best not to critique. Look, reporters and editors have a tough job at those publications. They are reporting on the very people — PR pros — who know how to promote a cause or a person better than anyone. So I imagine there is quite a lot of pushback and calls for fluffier fluff pieces than at your standard trade reporter’s job. Continue reading →

The headline of Julia Hood’s Feb. 16 column in PRWeek, “Don’t get Pinterest yet? It’s OK,” caused me to twinge slightly as soon as I read it. Not because I’m some social media snob who thinks that every PR pro must be an expert on every social network and emerging technology. Rather because it strikes me as odd that an editor at a publication that is supposed to champion the value and work of the PR industry would seemingly be communicating to the business community that it’s perfectly fine for PR pros not to “get” a social platform that is very much starting to impact clients. Continue reading →

I wrote this question in a note in my iPhone late one night last week. For those who don’t know me, I’m a bit of a nerd, and yes, these are the things I think about. Primarily, I posed this question to myself as part of my job at PRSA, which includes advocating the business value of PR. But I also ask it because I’m genuinely interested in finding the answer.

Who among my generation of PR pros — those old enough to remember Bacon’s before it became Cision but young enough that our entire careers have evolved online — will create the next great PR firm? The next Edelman or Burson-Marsteller or SHIFT Communications. The type of PR firm that comes to define a generation within the industry and advances the business of PR well beyond the status quo. Continue reading →

Could the celebrity plug — that beloved loathed centerpiece of many celebrity PR campaigns — be going the way of the Dodo? If the UK’s Guardian newspaper is any indication, it may be. And this could have profound effects on public relations.

To get the background on this movement, you have to go back to a somewhat obscure point in The Guardian’s updated editorial code. According to PRWeek, the revised code includes a new clause addressing the inclusion of promotional material in editorial. By its updated code, The Guardian — one of the world’s most influential newspapers — no longer allows its reporters to “promote products” in order to secure interviews with a PR pro’s client. Continue reading →

A couple of high-profile incidents last week once again raised questions as to whether PR is, in effect, “controlling” the national media. Personally, I don’t buy that notion, but the facts do bear some soul-searching.

The week began with a new website, Churnalism.com, aimed at exposing how the British media falls prey to PR’s supposedly sinister efforts to promote client agendas at the expense of fact-based reporting. Essentially, you paste a press release into the site’s search engine and it provides a percentage of that release that appeared, verbatim, in the UK national media. PRWeek (UK) has full coverage and commentary.

Also last Monday, a scathing article in POLITICO reported that Kurt Bardella, deputy communications director for Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), was leaking private e-mails from certain journalists to a New York Times reporter who is writing a book on Capitol Hill journalism. The hub-bub around that story quickly escalated, and Bardella was summarily fired (rightly so, IMO). Continue reading →